Today’s Guy News special report brings you the story of a young woman who worked for a well-known female Labour MP before she became elected in 2010. The former intern, whom we are calling Sarah and whose voice we are disguising, claims that she was the victim of “bullying” by the MP, that the MP would be “aggressive” and that she made her assistant cry on several occasions:

“She used to scream at us all the time. She wouldn’t let us out of the office for a cigarette together, she made us go individually because she was paranoid we would talk about her. She didn’t even like us going out for lunch at the same time. She’d say: “you’re talking about me, you’re talking about me”. She would get shouty and aggressive.

“I worked with her at XXX. This was 2008, 2009. We didn’t think she did any work for XXX. A lot of it was to do with XXX wanting to get selected. Going up and down the country all the time. We were surprised when she did get selected because she didn’t seem human.

One of my friends became XXX’s assistant. She said she had taken photocopies of her expenses in case XXX ever sacked her. Her office was upstairs and we would often hear her screaming at her assistant. She made her cry a few times.

She would go on trips and disappear, her boyfriend was an MP at the time, XXX. A lot of that was expensed, a lot of dinners, entertaining and travel that was not XXX related, going to Birmingham to see XXX.

If there was a briefing that went out to MPs, even if there wasn’t a mistake, she’d question why something was done a certain way. She shouted at me, she belittled me. She’d say “why did you do that, why did you do that… I can’t believe you spent two hours on this. This is terrible.”

Some of the guys had a slightly better time. I think she was tougher on female employees than the males ones. I left because it was such a horrible environment, I never thought anyone would pick her up on it. There was a conspiracy of silence not to criticise her, you don’t want to cause trouble. She did what she did and nobody said anything. I thought it was incredibly unfair she had got away with it. I know she has gone through a lot of staff. A woman called XXX was brought in to keep XXX away from the interns. No one who worked there liked or respected her, a lot of the ex-staff at XXX feel like that.

It was a small office and she was the boss so there was nowhere to go. The snappiness, shouting, the frostiness. This sort of thing happened a couple of times a week at least. I’d put it in the bullying category because it was so continual. My opinion is she is just cold and paranoid, a lot of it is driven by paranoia. I think it is remarkable that she’s got away with it for so long.

I’ve had ambitious female bosses before and they’ve not been like that. I think ambitious people are brilliant but there’s certain ways of doing things… it wasn’t the ambition. It was about discomfort in her own skin, not having confidence. It was difficult to believe a woman can be so horrible.”

If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in today’s Guy News Special Report, you can call the Guido Fawkes hotline on 0709 284 0531, anonymously and in complete confidence. You don’t need to suffer in silence…

GuidoFawkes Quote of the Day

“I read more bloggers now than mainstream columnists, because they’ve got more interesting things to say. Too many columnists today make you think, ‘Yeah, I think you’ve said that 10 times before and I’ve just noticed your column has not go a single fact in it’”.